Discovery of environmental resources based on heatmap recognition

Environmental data are considered of utmost importance for human life, since weather conditions, air quality and pollen are strongly related to health issues and affect everyday activities. This paper addresses the problem of discovery of air quality and pollen forecast Web resources, which are usually presented in the form of heatmaps (i.e. graphical representation of matrix data with colors). Towards the solution of this problem, we propose a discovery methodology, which builds upon a general purpose search engine and a novel post processing heatmap recognition layer. The first step involves generation of domain-specific queries, which are submitted to the search engine, while the second involves an image classification step based on visual low level features to identify Web sites including heatmaps. Experimental results comparing various visual features combinations show that relevant environmental sites can be efficiently recognized and retrieved.